Long before the suits arrive at the towers on Independence Avenue and the trading desks light up at the Ghana Stock Exchange, another economy is already at full speed. At Makola, at Kaneshie, at Agbogbloshie, and in markets across every region of Ghana, women are loading stalls, negotiating prices, extending credit, managing inventory, and sustaining the food supply chains that keep millions of households fed.
They do this every day. On Mother’s Day weekend, it is worth pausing to say clearly: this is not informal economic activity that happens alongside Ghana’s economy. In many respects, it is Ghana’s economy.
Women make up approximately 44.6 percent of Ghana’s micro, small, and medium enterprise owners. Nearly two-thirds of them operate informally, outside formal regulatory frameworks, without collateral, without credit histories that banks recognise, and without the contractual protections that formal businesses take for granted.
Research published this year from field studies across southern Ghana found women describing their market reality in terms that were both frank and quietly devastating: “Today you are selling peacefully. Tomorrow, they can tell you to move.” That instability is the water these enterprises swim in, every single day, often while raising children on the same income that funds the business.
The Invisible Labour That Built Modern Ghana
Sub-Saharan Africa has one of the highest rates of female entrepreneurship in the world; nearly one in four women is involved in an income-generating activity. Ghana is among the world’s leading countries in female business ownership. These are not small numbers.
They represent a vast engine of economic activity that has historically received a fraction of the policy attention directed at formal sector development. The government’s proposed Ghana Women’s Development Bank, backed by GH¢401 million in the 2026 budget, is the most targeted attempt yet to bridge this gap.
Whether it reaches the woman waking at four to set up her stall before wholesale prices shift, not just the female executive in the conference room, is the real test. This Mother’s Day, that woman deserves to be at the centre of the conversation, not the footnote
